Via Mezzocannone
 A view of via Mezzocannone. | |
Interactive map of Via Mezzocannone | |
| Part of |
|
|---|---|
| Location | Porto, Naples Municipality II |
Postal code | 80134 |
Via Mezzocannone is a street in Naples which, in the district of Porto, connects Piazzetta Nilo and Piazza San Domenico to Corso Umberto I. It is about 450 metres long.
Etymology
The name derives from a fountain located roughly halfway along its length (near via Sedile di Porto), commissioned in the 15th century by Alfonso II, King of Naples and Duke of Calabria.
This fountain, made of piperno and set against the wall for watering horses, had an extremely short spout (in Neapolitan, cannola or cannone, hence mezzo, "half"), and depicted a royal figure in an awkward pose, so much so that "'o Rre 'e Miezocannone" ("the King of Mezzocannone") became a byword for a ridiculous bearing or particular clumsiness,[1] probably meant to represent Alfonso II himself. The fountain was dismantled when the street was widened, and its remains, kept in a municipal storehouse, were later lost.
Part of it was rediscovered in the 1970s by Giancarlo Alisio in an antique dealer's shop:[2][3] a square marble inlay bearing an inscription dedicated to Alfonso II, and a Medusa head from which the mezzocannone spout would have emerged, similar to another fountain, the now-lost Fontana dei Serpi, on the vanished via del Pendino.
Another proposed etymology traces the name to a unit of measurement for the fountain's water flow. At the time, the canna and the cannone were units used to measure water flow, and the fountain is said to have had a flow of mezzo cannone ("half a cannone").
History
The street's original course partly followed the ancient ravine that had formed between two of the city's walls near the so-called Porta Ventosa or Licinia.[4] Before the Risanamento, the street, then much narrower, was home to dyers who, working in their shops, let their dye mixtures run down toward the bottom of the street, making it nearly impassable.[5] Salvatore Di Giacomo described the "budello di Mezzocannone" ("Mezzocannone gut") as "a filthy Neapolitan intestine".
Near what, before the Risanamento works, was called Vicolo Mezzocannone[6] (as if bearing witness to the narrowness and decay typical of the street) stood the famous fountain of the same name.
Already in the Angevin period, moreover, numerous noble palaces, surrounded by gardens and fountains, had been built around the street. In particular, on the right-hand side of the street, at the start of the Rampe of the Church of San Giovanni Maggiore (which still exists today), stood the Palazzo di Fabrizio Colonna, dating from the 15th century.
Following the Risanamento, the street was widened to connect the decumanus inferior (and thus the entire upper part of the city) with the reclaimed areas.
In the central part of the street, all the buildings were demolished to make way, on the right-hand side, for university buildings, and, on the left-hand side, for the widening of the street and the construction of residential buildings. Within these new Umbertine-era buildings, however, some traces of the earlier structures survive: the bas-relief of Orion, symbol of the old Porto Sedile, popularly known as Niccolò Pesce,[7][8] on one of the buildings on the left; and the portal of Palazzo Colonna, incorporated into the university building housing the Faculty of Natural Sciences, on the right-hand side of the street.
At the end of via Mezzocannone, near Piazzetta Nilo, the convents of Gesù Vecchio and Donnaromita survived the Risanamento, only to be demolished later to widen the final stretch of the street as part of a broader renovation of the university buildings; likewise, a bay of the eighteenth-century Palazzo di Sangro di Casacalenda was cut away, erasing what remained of the church of Santa Maria della Rotonda, on which the palace had been built. Also on the right-hand side of the street stands a large masonry structure corresponding to the former Church of San Girolamo delle Monache, destroyed by bombing during the World War II.
Palazzo Saluzzo di Corigliano (seat of the L'Orientale university)..JPG)
Building of the Federico II University's Biotechnology department.
Palazzo Giusso (another seat of the L'Orientale university).
Building of the Federico II University's Law and Humanities departments..jpg)
Building of the Federico II University's Humanities department.
Building of the Mineralogy Museum (satellite site of the Biotechnology department).
Via Mezzocannone today
With the construction of the large new university buildings, via Mezzocannone has become the centre of university, and more broadly student, life in the capital of Campania. It is home to the first university of Naples, which houses historic museums of biological and natural sciences and, above all, the State University Library, which holds more than 1,200,000 volumes and around 18,000 periodicals.
Today, all of the street's activity revolves around the university, with the street lined by bookshops, print shops, and historic publishing houses such as "De Frede", founded in the late nineteenth century, as well as copy shops, stationery stores, bars, and distinctive venues (on the side street "Rampe San Giovanni Maggiore", for instance, the venue "La Chitarra", opened in 1991 by Neapolitan singer and guitarist Egisto Sarnelli, is still there today).
References
- ↑ Alisio, Giancarlo (1980). Il Risanamento. Recupero di una struttura urbana (in Italian). ESI. SBN SBL0300780.
- ↑ Ferraro, Italo (2003). Napoli. Atlante della città storica: Quartieri bassi e il "Risanamento" (in Italian). Vol. 2. CLEAN. ISBN 88-8497-081-4.
- ↑ "Ora la Finanza ha ritrovato l'antica fontana" [Now the finance police have found the ancient fountain]. La Repubblica (in Italian). 12 June 1992. Retrieved 29 August 2024.
- ↑ Romualdo Marrone, Le strade di Napoli, Newton & Compton Editori, Rome 1996, ISBN 88-8183-426-X, p. 589.
- ↑ Matilde Serao described several streets leading down to the Porto district as very steep, narrow, and poorly paved, noting that via Mezzocannone was entirely populated by dyers, with a fire burning under a large black cauldron at the back of each dark shop, where half-naked men stirred a steaming mixture, red and violet rags drying by the doorway, and a multicoloured dye residue always trickling over the uneven paving stones; The Belly of Naples.
- ↑ Benedetto Croce wrote that the dark, crooked, steep, slippery alley of Mezzocannone had never been touched by the Risanamento and probably never would be, describing its airless, sunless houses, its shops that looked like cellars occupied by dyers, wine sellers, and even embroiderers of church items working in silk and gold in the street itself, its clumsy king of Mezzocannone atop an old fountain, and the adjoining drop of the Gradelle di San Giovanni Maggiore, noting that this true Mezzocannone alley had been left to them, still passable in haste while holding one's nose, and that the new university building then under construction on the Rettifilo side did not seem as beautiful as the old university had once been; Storie e leggende napoletane, Biblioteca Adelphi.
- ↑ Matilde Serao described a route reaching the old Porto seggio via a small square, glancing at the statue of the god Orion attached to the wall, popularly called Pesce Niccolò, before climbing via Mezzocannone past the blue, red, and violet dye-stained waters of the dyers working around black cauldrons in gloomy dens; Piccole anime.
- ↑ Benedetto Croce described the bas-relief as depicting a hairy man holding a long dagger, said in local legend to be the knife Niccolò Pesce used to cut open the bellies of the fish inside which he travelled; he noted it had been relocated to the wall of a newly built house near a first-floor balcony after the original building was demolished, with the old eighteenth-century inscription reinstalled beneath it, recording that it had been unearthed during the digging of the foundations of the Sedile di Porto, as confirmed by Neapolitan topographers, who added that the find dated to the time of Charles I of Anjou; Benedetto Croce, Storie e leggende napoletane, Biblioteca Adelphi.